607 – 12th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1639 – Cambridge College renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard
1677 – Massachusetts gains title to Maine for $6,000
1759 – 27th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1781 – Sir William Herschel sees “comet” which turned out to be Uranus
1888 – Great Blizzard of 1888 rages
1888 – Third day of the Great blizzard of ’88
In March of 1888 New York City was slammed by one of the most devastating blizzards in recorded history. For four days, from the 11th to the15th the Northeast, from Maryland to Maine was buried underneath a fifty-inch blanket of snow.
In New York City more than 200 perished in the extreme cold.
In the icy darkness of night fires raged as helpless volunteers watched from afar, their teams trapped in the deep drifts that formed in the howling winds. Railroads were shut down and people confined to their houses for up to a week. Following the storm, New York began placing its telegraph and telephone infrastructure underground to prevent future destruction.
Drifts across the New York-New Haven rail line took eight days to clear The weather preceding the blizzard was unseasonably mild with heavy rains that turned to snow as temperatures dropped rapidly. New York’s Central Park Observatory reported a low temperature of 6 °F (−14 °C), and a daytime average of 9 °F (−13 °C) on March 13
1900 – In France the length of the workday for women and children is limited to 11 hours by law.
1925 – Tennessee makes it unlawful to teach evolution
1930 – Clyde Tombaugh announces discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory
1943 – Failed assassin attempt on Hitler during Smolensk-Rastenburg flight
1985 – Funeral services held for Konstantin Chernenko in Moscow
1986 – Microsoft has its Initial public offering.
1991 – Exxon pays $1-billion dollars in fines and cleanup of Valdez oil spill
1993 – Blizzard of ’93 hits northeast US
2003 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
2012 – Encyclopaedia Britannica announces that it will no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia
2013 – Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected as the new pope, taking the papal name Pope Francis
Birthdays
1855 – Percival “Percy” Lowell, US astronomer who predicted discovery of Pluto.
1913 – William J Casey, headed CIA during Iran-contra scandal (1981-87).
1939 – Neil Sedaka, Brooklyn New York, American singer/songwriter (Breaking Up is Hard to Do)
Anniversaries
1961 – Pablo Picasso (79) marries Jacqueline Rocque (37)
Deaths
1842 – Henry Shrapnel, British soldier and inventor (b. 1761)
1938 – Clarence S Darrow, Scopes Monkey Trial attorney, dies in Chicago at 80
1964 – Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death in Queens; her screams went unanswered by many of her neighbors. Her death made national news depicting urbanites as asocial and uncaring.
Various internet sources and searches are used in the making of this document
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